Industry

Products

Employees

Parent

Website

Retro Studios is an American video game developer based in Austin, Texas, USA. It was founded in 1998 by Jeff Spangenberg as a second-party developer to Nintendo. It is currently wholly owned by Nintendo, making it a first-party developer, with over 50 employees.

Contents

Retro's unique in the sense that we love being in Texas. Texas is just a cool place, and that really reflects in the culture. We are Nintendo employees. We have a very different perspective on developing games. We really strive to think like our friends in Japan. They've been doing it longer than anybody else, and we appreciate the opportunity of the mentorship that we're given from people like Mr. Sakamoto, Mr. Tanabe, Mr. Miyamoto... no other North American developer is going to get that experience working with that calibre of individual, or individuals, on a project-by-project basis. It's just not going to happen in North America.

Retro Studios struggled in its early years, dealing with several cancelled projects and lay-offs. However, Nintendo came to their aid by offering the company the license to the dormant Metroid franchise, whose last game was Super Metroid, released in 1994.

The first big project that Retro Studios worked on with Nintendo was Metroid Prime, one of the biggest titles for the Nintendo GameCube, receiving both critical and public acclaim. In 2001, then-president Jeff Spangenberg sold his share of stock in the company to Nintendo and left shortly thereafter.

In 2003, Michael Kelbaugh was named president of Retro Studios, and the following year released Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, which proved to be just as much of a critical success as the first game.

“

We're pretty laid back as far as studio life is concerned. We've got a gym, and we've got a nice cafeteria. We've got a lot of assets that we can use for making our day to day life better.

In 2007, Retro Studios completed Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the Nintendo Wii. Their latest Metroid title is the Metroid Prime Trilogy, a compilation of Retro's three Prime titles on one disk. Following Trilogy, Retro Studios decided to take a break from Metroid for a while, and did not work on Metroid: Other M, although they did also state that they would consider revisiting the Metroid franchise at a later date. In 2010, however, they had released their first game to not be Metroid, Donkey Kong Country Returns. They also recently codeveloped Mario Kart 7 for the Nintendo 3DS. Their most recent release is Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for the Wii U and Nintendo Switch.

According to Shigeru Miyamoto, Retro will be "very high priority" when choosing who will develop the next Metroid game.[2]

Retro Studios was said to be working on a new game for the Wii U in 2014, shortly after the release of Tropical Freeze. However, the status of this project is unknown as nothing has been said about it since. Bill Trinen confirmed that Retro is not developing Metroid Prime 4, which is instead being handled by an unknown new development team led by Kensuke Tanabe.[3]